Inside California's $7.5 billion drought-survival plan

The drought in California is a disaster unfolding in slow motion. The alarm was first sounded earlier this year as snowpack in the state’s mountainous areas was far thinner than usual. Arid conditions have continued since, leaving reservoirs at record lows – cities are announcing usage limits for the first time in years, and farmers are rapidly draining water from underground aquifers just to stay in business.

The chance of a moisture-bringing El Niño climate event happening later this year, which some had looked to for salvation, has fallen from 80 to 65 per cent according to the latest forecasts.

Against this backdrop, governor Jerry Brown signed legislation last week that will allow California’s voters to decide whether the state can spend &dollar;7.5 billion to address the problem. The bond will be spent on ensuring California’s drinking water supply, improving groundwater management, boosting conservation and preserving the ecosystems that are being destroyed by the drought conditions. The vote is set for November.

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Big spenders

The largest chunk of money, &dollar;2.7 billion, is slated for new water storage capacity, an essential resource if the state is to make it through long dry periods like the current one.

The California Department of Water Resources plans to spend the money on the proposed Sites reservoir, a 2.23-cubic-kilometre reservoir in the Sacramento valley. It will siphon off water from the Sacramento river in times of flood, saving it as a buffer for lean times. If built by 2019 as planned, the reservoir will be able to deliver up to 600 billion litres of water every year for drinking, agriculture, industrial use and preserving ecosystems in northern California.

The bill also designates &dollar;510 million to improve the state’s water management, &dollar;100 million to boost water conservation, and &dollar;200 million to help capture and treat storm water run-off.

The new normal

Although the current drought keeps water managers focused on the present, climate change remains a concern. “It’s something we all need to keep in mind,” says Heather Cooley, director of the water programme at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.

“These extremes – very wet and very dry – are likely to become more frequent going forward,” she says. While climate scientists don’t all agree about whether California will be wetter or drier over all, they do agree that it will be warmer, and that more of the state’s precipitation will fall as rain, rather than snow.

This is a problem, because snowfall high in the mountains has provided a huge, natural reservoir for centuries. “Snowpack is our largest reservoir,” Cooley says.

As well as building more reservoirs, Cooley says, water managers are going to need to rethink how they operate existing ones. Instead of just letting them fill slowly as snow melts during the spring, they will need to be ready to catch torrents of floodwater, which the state cannot afford to lose.

Changing how existing storage facilities work is not easy. “Some of these reservoirs you need acts of Congress to change how they operate,” says Cooley.

Article amended on
19 August 2014

Since this article was first published, the percentage chance of an El Niño event happening has been revised.